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Rabbi Janet Marder July 26, 2009 Contemporary Jewish Theologies: Asilomar 2009 “Apparently with No Surprise” by Emily Dickinson:
We have before us a simple situation. The frost has come too early, while the flower is still in bloom, before it’s had a chance to turn to fruit and scatter its seeds onto the earth. Early frost kills the flower, and the sun – the blond assassin – callously moves on, indifferent to what has been lost. So are lives cut off prematurely, randomly; and God, it would seem, does not care. It is not that nature is cruel, says the poem; it is simply that nature is blind, uninterested in our concerns. As Stephen Jay Gould has written: “[N]ature does not exist for us, didn’t know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological moment), and doesn’t give a damn about us… [“Leonardo’s
Another poem, this one from the 20th century: “Out, Out,” by Robert Frost:
[From "Complete Poems of Robert Frost", 1916] The poem seems to have been based on an actual event -- a tragic accident that occurred in March, 1910: the son of Frost’s neighbor and friend lost his hand to a buzz saw. Loss of blood sent him into shock and he died of heart failure despite the doctor’s efforts to save him. The sudden maiming and death of a boy working on the family farm, an event made all the more shocking by the poem’s casual tone, occurs in the same blank, indifferent universe we met in our first poem. But here the cool indifference is human – expressed in those who take brief notice of the boy’s passing and then move on, seemingly unaffected, turning to their own affairs. Life is hard on a farm, and New Englanders are stoic about facing reality. The title of Frost’s poem – “Out, Out” -- links it to some of the darkest words in English literature about a universe empty of moral concerns. From the famous soliloquy uttered by Macbeth after he learns of the death of his wife:
Robert Frost’s poem sets a single short life, snuffed out by chance and soon forgotten, against Macbeth’s bitter and savage mocking of life itself: despite our pathetic pretensions as we strut onstage, it is all over in an instant, without purpose, meaning, substance or consequence. This is the nihilism and despair of a murderer, of course. To argue that life has no significance means that his terrible crimes do not matter, as well. And so Macbeth’s bleak words not only reflect the disintegration of his soul – they also release him from responsibility. Clearly, it is not just the modern sensibility that has given birth to pessimism, doubt and desolation. All three of these works, and many others written prior to the horrors of the 20th century, reflect in various ways a profound questioning of the idea of Divine Providence – God’s benevolent guidance of the universe and loving care for all its creatures. And so we question, as well. Can we uphold a religious consciousness in the midst of the modern world? Can we believe in God? Today I’m going to talk about three contemporary Jewish theologies – each of them an effort to confront honestly the realities of this world while affirming that God indeed exists. All three, to some extent, preserve belief in God by redefining what God is – but that is nothing new in human history. Polytheism, monotheism, the many faces of God of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, the New Testament and Koran and the works of the medieval period -- all reflect a continuous process of re-envisioning divinity. It is not God who changes, of course, but our notions about God, just as our notions about everything else have evolved over time. We begin by taking a look at Reconstructionist theology, best exemplified by Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan and two well-known rabbis and authors who were influenced by him: Harold Kushner and Harold Schulweis. Mordechai Kaplan was born in 1881 in a small town in
Kaplan’s ideas worked a quiet revolution in Jewish institutional life, leading to the creation of Jewish community centers and the rise of a new movement, Reconstructionism, which, though small, has exerted a powerful influence on the shape of American Judaism. We’ll focus especially on his theological ideas today. Kaplan, begins by acknowledging the central importance of God in Judaism and Jewish identity, writing “To leave Moses out….and to have his place taken, say by Jesus, is to change the Jewish into a Christian consciousness. By the same token, as Jews we cannot omit God from our consciousness without thereby being less Jewish. If Moses is writ large over every page of the [Torah]…God is writ large over every page of our national literature…..Interpret God as you will…but you cannot afford to ignore Him if your purpose is to cultivate a Jewish consciousness” [“The God Idea in Judaism,” in The Jewish Reconstructionist Papers, ed. Mordechai Kaplan, p.90]. It might be simpler for many Jews if we could just find a way to elbow God out of Judaism. Kaplan is an educated Jew, so he knows that’s impossible, unless we want to turn Judaism into something else. But Kaplan believed that we should never assume a “fixed and static conception of God.” He passionately defended the need for our religious beliefs to progress along with our other ideas and ideals. A religion that can speak to modern, well-educated Jews grounded in science and democratic principles, he said, must be purged of all traces of authoritarianism, dogmatism and reliance on the supernatural. For Judaism that means doing away with any notion of God as an anthropomorphic, person-like being who does miracles by suspending the laws of nature. For Kaplan, the most important issue religion must address is: “What shall man believe and do in order to experience that life, despite the evil and suffering that mar it, is extremely worthwhile?” Religion, he said, is about “the pursuit of salvation” – making this world better – and God, according to Kaplan’s famous definition, is “the Power that makes for salvation.” He used the analogy of a compass needle: as the force of magnetism draws the needle towards the north, God is the power that draws human beings towards goodness and supports our efforts and strivings. For Kaplan, life is no idiot’s tale and the universe is structured with purpose and meaning. He believed that this power was evident in the cosmos and influences our lives in palpable ways. We experience God, then, as the urge within us to do what is right – to act with generosity, responsibility and concern for others. Sometimes Kaplan sounds like he is talking not about a single power but an assortment of energies and powers. Here’s another of his definitions: “God is the sum of the animating, organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos.” Kaplan focused on the sense, which most people share, that the world is not the way it’s supposed to be. We have a vision of a better world, a just and peaceful social order. Our experience of life as worthwhile, purposeful and meaningful depends on our belief that this vision can be realized someday. Otherwise, why bother getting up in the morning? Why strive to make things better, or take risks and make sacrifices for the sake of the good? We sense God in the urge we feel to improve this world – and in the conviction we have that our efforts matter, and will ultimately be successful. As Kaplan put it: “God may…be defined as the power that endorses what we believe ought to be, and that guarantees that it will be” [ibid., p.95]. “Belief in [God],” he wrote, “is a necessary concomitant of all idealistic behavior” [ibid., p.97]. I think he would add that belief is a necessary foundation for hope. This is obviously a God very different from the God we meet in the Bible and Talmud. Kaplan’s God is not a Being; not a personality with whom one could have a relationship. One would probably not envision praying to an impersonal force like magnetism, or loving it with all one’s heart and soul and might, or believing that this force knows and cares about us. Prayer, for a Reconstructionist Jew, is not about communicating with a higher power but about joining in solidarity with our people, and awakening and inspiring our best selves. In Kaplan’s universe, flowers will be nipped in the bud and buzz saws will slice off the hands of children, because that is the way thing are: nature operates according to regular laws, and those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time will inevitably get hurt. There is no God to blame or get mad at when such things happen. There is only the power of God gradually working its way through the cosmos, and through us, motivating human beings to fight the evil and redress the wrongs, buoyed by the confidence that their efforts will not be in vain, for, as Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Implied in Mordechai Kaplan’s theory is the idea that God, as but one aspect of the universe, is not in charge of all that happens within nature. Some evils – war, poverty and bigotry, for example – are clearly the result of human failure. But natural evils, such as illness and birth defects, seem to be the result of forces that operate independent of God. This element of Kaplan’s theory was articulated most memorably by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his first book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” On the first page of this work, Kushner describes it as “a very personal book, written by someone who believes in God and in the goodness of the world…” [p.1]. As many of you know, he wrote the book following the tragic death of his son Aaron at age 14 from progeria, a disease that causes premature aging. This experience forced Kushner and his wife to reconsider the idea of God they had “grown up with….an image of God as an all-wise, all-powerful parent figure who would treat us as our earthly parents did, or even better.” Kushner asserts that, when it comes to God discourse, “There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people?” He analyzes, one by one, the explanations offered by Jewish tradition for the existence of evil in a world governed by an loving, omnipotent God: that suffering is a punishment justly meted out by God to those who deserve it; that “God has His reasons” and there is purpose to our suffering -- suffering and evil are part of God’s grand design that human beings cannot fathom; that pain and suffering are “educational” – God’s way of teaching us a lesson and helping us to become better people; that tragedy is a “test” given only to those who can handle it; that premature death is a cause for celebration rather than grief because the dead are in a better place; that the innocent will be compensated for their suffering after death, in the world to come. Kushner dismisses each of these arguments as unhelpful at best, and repugnant at worst – they are illogical, based on wishful thinking, or unworthy of God, portraying God in a petty or sadistic light. “All the responses to tragedy which we have considered,” he wrote, “have at least one thing in common. They all assume that God is the cause of our suffering, and they try to understand why God would want us to suffer….There may be another approach. Maybe God does not cause our suffering. Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God….Could it be that God does not cause the bad things that happen to us?…Could it be that ‘How could God do this to me?’ is really the wrong question for us to ask?” Kushner then advanced his theory – an idea which, in 1981, when the book was published, was radical and shocking to many of his readers. God, he says, “is a God of justice and not of power….Our misfortunes are none of His doing.” Why do bad things happen to good people? He writes: “Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe?” To explain this, Kushner uses the metaphor of creation as described in the Genesis story. “We know today that the world took billions of years to take shape, not six days….Suppose that Creation, the process of replacing chaos with order, were still going on. What would that mean? In the metaphor of the six days of Creation, we would find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Friday afternoon. Man was created just a few ‘hours’ ago. The world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God’s thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain. “….A change of wind direction or the shifting of a tectonic plate can cause a hurricane or earthquake to move toward a populated area instead of out into an uninhabited stretch of land. Why?….A drunken driver steers his car over the center line of the highway and collides with the green Chevrolet instead of the red Ford fifty feet farther away. An engine bolt breaks on flight 205 instead of on flight 209, inflicting tragedy on one random group of families rather than another. There is no message in all of that….These events do not reflect God’s choices. They happen at random, and randomness is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God’s creative light has not yet penetrated.” Kaplan was sure that the universe was progressing towards the good. Kushner frankly admits that he is troubled by the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy or increasing randomness in the universe. But he, like Albert Einstein, does not give randomness the last word. He writes: “It may be that….a system left to itself may evolve in the direction of randomness. On the other hand, our world may not be a system left to itself. There may in fact be a creative impulse acting on it, the Spirit of God hovering over the dark waters, operating over the course of millennia to bring order out of chaos. …Or it may be that God finished his work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. Residual chaos, chance and mischance, things happening for no reason, will continue to happen to us….In that case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.” In the Book of Isaiah [45:7] God is portrayed as saying “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” Harold Kushner, like his teacher Mordechai Kaplan, redefines the Biblical God more narrowly as the power identified only with what is good and right. Kushner’s God, less impersonal than Kaplan’s, is loving and sympathetic – he draws from the Talmud’s images of a God who suffers and grieves along with the exiled people
By advancing the notion of a God of limited power, who is not in complete control of the universe, Kushner sought to help his readers remain in relationship with God rather than rejecting God in anger. “We will turn to God,” he writes, “not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.” While God cannot do everything, Kushner firmly believes that prayer can indeed offer us greater reservoirs of strength and patience to cope with the problems we face. Another of Mordechai Kaplan’s students, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, in books such as “Evil and the Morality of God” and “For Those Who Can’t Believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith,” sought to find language that would speak to skeptical or agnostic Jews and draw them back into religious life. Schulweis urges us to focus not on asking what God is, but on the idea of “godliness,” a quality within all of us. When we read in the prayerbook, for example, that “God is merciful,” or “God is just,” we should reframe these words instead into statements like these:
It’s misleading, he says, to understand God as a noun, an entity outside ourselves to whom we pray and for whom we wait, passively, to “save, rescue and redeem” us. Schulweis asks us instead to conceive of God as a verb or an adverb, realized in human actions whose sanctity we instinctively recognize [see Schulweis sermon “Outreach to Jewish Secularists and Athiests,” Yom Kippur, 2004]. God is present, God is made real, he says, whenever we engage in godly behavior. Two classic names of God, Elohim and Adonai, for Schulweis represent two aspects of the divine. Elohim is “the source of all that is, and is found in nature” – revealed in flowers, sunsets and earthquakes, in birth, disease and death. Adonai is the source of morality, the divine image within us that inspires us to engage in godly acts. “The world created by Elohim is incomplete,” he writes. “Everything in the created world has to be perfected…. We are to repair the creation of Elohim through the transforming power of Adonai that lies potentially with us and between us human beings. Elohim is the real. Adonai is the ideal. And when we recite "Hear O Israel, Adonai our Elohim is echad -- we mean that the real and the ideal, are one; "is" and "ought" belong together” [Sermon “Theological Courage”; Address to the Rabbinical Assembly, 2000]. The Reconstructionist theology of Kaplan, Kushner and Schulweis, intended to be both intellectually plausible and emotionally comforting, has in fact been deeply meaningful to millions of readers, freeing them from irrelevant images and objectionable ideas. Others, however, are profoundly put off by this kind of theology. One Orthodox review I read called Kushner’s idea of a universe in which God is not in charge “terrifying.” Others wonder why one would bother worshipping a God so limited in power – “impotent,” as one critic put it. A woman in my former congregation professed herself frankly annoyed by the way these thinkers, as she said, “give God credit for all the good and let Him off the hook for all the evil.” I found it interesting that she, a staunch atheist, clung so tenaciously to one fixed image of the God she did not believe in, and refused to allow for the possibility of another way of imagining what God might mean. More traditional, but equally radical in some ways, is the second theory I’ll discuss: the neo-Kabbalistic or mystical theology best articulated, in my view, by Arthur Green in two books: “Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology” and “Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow.” Dr. Green, professor emeritus of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and dean of the Rabbinical School at Boston’s Hebrew College, has also written several scholarly books on Jewish spirituality, mysticism and Hasidism. He begins by exploring the notion of God’s oneness and what that might mean in its deepest sense. Our Torah portion this past Shabbat says, “Know then this day and set it upon your heart that Adonai is God in heaven above and on earth beneath; there is none else” [Dt.4:39]. The Jewish mystic understands those last words to mean, “There is nothing else but God.” God is all there is – nothing else exists. God is the reality that underlies all things. Green writes: “The basic teaching of mystics, dressed in the garb of many traditions, is essentially this simple message: There is only One. All multiplicity of beings and their sense of separateness and distance from one another are either illusion or represent a less than ultimate truth. This is especially the case …in the great alienation or sense of distance that humans feel between themselves and God” [Ehyeh, p.19]. Green seeks to free us from the traditional Western notion that God is a separate Being -- something “up there” or “out there” outside ourselves – what he calls “the myth of verticality.” He writes: “As much as we outgrow such thinking in our strivings for religious maturity, the image of ‘God above’ never quite leaves us. It is reinforced every time we read a psalm about God who ‘dwells in heaven,’ every time we tell a story about Moses ‘going up to heaven’ to receive the Torah….But suppose for the moment that we allowed ourselves to be freed from this upper world/lower world way of thinking….Let us think of the journey to God as a journey inward, where the goal is ultimately a deep level of the universe within the self rather than the top of the mountain or a ride in the clouds…..Inwardness means that the One is to be found within all beings” [Seek My Face., pp.9-10]. God is within us, that is, because we exist within God. Though we imagine ourselves to be independent and separate beings, we are in truth part of God, as all things, animate and inanimate, are part of God, as waves exist within the ocean – rising up for a moment, as if separate and distinct, then falling away, merging back into the source whence they came. “God is Being,” writes Green [Eyheh, p.2]. Is this pantheism, the belief that the universe and God, or nature and God, are the same thing? Not for Jewish mystics. Nature is part of God but not identical with God. God is “the source from which all being emerges, the flowing font from which all is sustained” [ibid., p.57]. God is “immanent” in the world -- manifest to us in the dazzling richness of the universe we inhabit, in all its magnificent diversity. But God is also “transcendent” – greater than and beyond the universe; the One who is called by the Kabbalists “Ein Sof” – the infinite, ultimately unknowable and inaccessible to us. “God is the place of the world,” the midrash says, meaning that the universe exists entirely within God, “but the world is not God’s place” – meaning that God is more than the universe” [Bereishit Rabba 68:10, quoted in Ehyeh, p.2]. What is the relationship between the Infinite One about whom we can say nothing, and the God revealed to us in nature’s variety? Did God make the world? Kabbalah teaches that Ein Sof becomes present to us through the ten Sefirot, ten emanations of the Divine. Green describes this as follows: “’God created the world’ is our Jewish-mythic way of saying ‘The One underlies – and enters into – the many.’ This view essentially sees Creation as emanation: the ‘act’ about which we speak is really a process, a flowing forth of the divine self…. It is divinity becoming universe, or pure being garbing itself in forms, rather than a specific deity creating a universe outside itself” [ibid, p.56]. Kabbalah sees creation as a continuous process without which nothing could exist. God is the power that surges through the universe and makes all things possible, and God is also the source of that power – the two are inseparable, as the sun is inseparable from the rays of light that reach us. “God is always present, within and behind the world as we know it,” Green writes, “sending forth the renewing source of energy from within the deepest recesses of God’s own self” [p.28]. How can we make sense of this? Kabbalah speaks the colorful language of poetry; originally, in the 13th century, it was a kind of protest against the abstract, hyper-rationalism of Maimonides. Today, neo-Kabbalistic thought acts as a kind of protest against the abstract, hyper-rational thought of people like Mordechai Kaplan. I understand Kabbalistic theology best by thinking about poetry. Take, for example, these great lines from Dylan Thomas:
See how they capture the mystic’s sense of power surging through the universe like an electric current, manifest in all things, including ourselves. We feel it as well in these famous lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins:
As far as I know,
It is in this sense that neo-Kabbalistics like Art Green understand the meaning of terms like “revelation” – the idea that God “gave the Torah.” For him, “revelation” does not mean a one-time event when a Deity dictated words on top of a mountain. It does not mean that the Israelites suddenly received “a truth that we did not possess previously.” “On the contrary,” he writes, “the primary meaning of revelation [is] that our eyes are now opened, we are able to see that which had been true all along but was hidden from us. We see the same world that existed before the great religious experience, but now we see it differently. The truth that God underlies reality, and always has, now becomes completely apparent” [Ehyeh, p.34]. For Green, what happened at Sinai was not that specific laws and rules were transmitted to
But if we are within God, what can it mean that God is “revealed” to us? In a beautiful passage, Green writes: “The human-Divine encounter is more like the breaking down of a wall than like the building of a bridge. It is a discovery that there is no chasm, rather than a claim that the chasm can be traversed. Finally, it is the realization that the wall itself was illusory, and the sense of separation lies only in our own unreadiness to discovery the deeper truth” [Seek My Face, p.113]. As creation is an ongoing process of energy infusing the cosmos, so revelation is also ongoing: the continuous process of opening one’s eyes to the reality of God. “Every human journey contains within it something of Moses’ trek up the mountainside,” writes Green. “Every human attempt at making meaning, at understanding the purpose of human existence, at rejecting cynicism in a quest of truth, has something of Sinai in it. Whenever we assert – by deed as well as word – that life is not absurd, that accident and emptiness are not our only lot, we are climbing up God’s mountain” [ibid. p.114]. We can understand and appreciate the idea that there is a unity to the universe; at some moments we may even reach the ecstatic consciousness that celebrates the sacred energy flowing through all being. But does any moral imperative flow from this consciousness? Theologies may be judged in a functional sense, by the kind of behavior they inspire in those who adopt them. With no notion of a commanding God, a moral power beyond ourselves who calls us to righteousness, does Green’s neo-Kabbalistic theory show us how to live? He says that it does. There are several mitzvot, several fundamental Jewish obligations, that arise from Green’s theology. First: the mitzvah of awareness: “the obligation to become and to remain aware of the divine presence is the foundation of all religious life,” he writes. “Regular prayer or meditation is essential to the path.” He recommends especially some time for prayer or meditation at dawn and sunset, writing, “There is a quality of being in those moments when light changes, as day begins and day ends, that naturally leads to a deep inner silence. It is the great wisdom of our tradition to have proclaimed those hours as the two daily prayer times…” [Seek My Face, p.75-6]. The second mitzvah arising from Green’s theology is “that of treating every human being as the image of God” [ibid., p.77]. This mitzvah is inspired by our awareness of the divine spark within all people – a realization that “makes an unambiguous demand….To take seriously our faith that each person is God’s image is to treat all people with a spiritual dignity and caring that can transform our lives” [ibid., p.78-9]. A third mitzvah is keeping Shabbat – a day set apart. Green describes Shabbat as “an extended meditation on the wonders of the creative world and the divine presence that fills it.” He offers suggestions rather than strict guidelines about how to observe Shabbat, reminding us that the seventh day should be about “joy and not restriction. The rules for Shabbat exist in order to create the sacred time in which the transformation of consciousness that is Shabbat’s real meaning may take place”[p.80-1]. A fourth mitzvah proceeding from our Jewish mystical consciousness is that of guarding and preserving God’s world, showing love and reverence for the earth’s resources and its creatures. Other mitzvot arising from this theology are the need to use God’s sacred gift of language with care and sensitivity, avoiding malicious and destructive talk; the mitzvah of studying and struggling with Torah, and of preserving our spiritual heritage and transmitting it to the next generation. Most powerful, for Green, is the mitzvah of “getting to work,” -- taking up “the redemptive task” of bringing God’s light and compassion to all the world. And what about suffering? What about the fragile flower nipped too soon by the frost, or Macbeth’s bleak vision of the human candle flickering out in a void? Understanding God as being itself leaves us no one and nothing to accuse or blame for suffering; this world in which we are subject to pain is simply the only world we know. “Our vulnerability to illness, accident, and other forms of tragic hurt is an essential part of our mortality,” writes Green. But Green also clings, in a rather unusual fashion, to Biblical and rabbinic notions of God’s compassion. He writes: “….It is in a nontraditional and yet somehow more than a metaphorical sense that we can say God cares about and participates in human pain. If the human mind is part of that great collective mind that we call the mind of God, and if the human heart is part of the one great heart that is God’s, then human suffering is a part of the legacy that remains forever bound up in the divine One….We might extend this to say that whoever causes suffering to a human being brings pain to the presence of God as it is manifest in that person” [Ibid., p.90]. Green contends that as human beings exist within God and bear God within ourselves, God’s goodness can only be realized through our actions. “We recognize that our human limbs are the only limbs that exist in this world to bear upon them the truly divine gift of compassion,” he writes. And so he calls for “a realization that the task is ours to do; we can no longer wait for the divine hand, separate from our own, to come and save. But this acceptance of responsibility is itself a sacred task for us….The hands and feet of God do bring redemption, but they are none other than our own limbs, offered to us by our Maker in order to fulfill their true purpose” [ibid., p.172-3]. The last contemporary theology I want to describe, more briefly, is that of an Orthodox religious thinker: Eliezer Berkovits. Born in
Berkovits is best known to the English-speaking public for his 1973 book entitled “Faith After the Holocaust.” Recently David Hazony of the Shalem Institute in
Berkovits addresses himself to the same question Harold Kushner asked, the classical issue of theodicy: may God’s goodness be justified in the face of evil? He writes: “There is a simple way to resolve the crisis of faith presented by the Jewish death-camp experience. One may meet the problem with a resolutely negative approach and say that what happened was only possible because God has abandoned the Jew, because He is not concerned with what happens to man. One might cut the Gordian knot with the classical [Talmudic] formula: ‘There is no justice and there is no judge!’ This would be the Jewish version of what today has become known as radical theology” [p.71]. Berkovits refers here to writers such as Richard Rubenstein who asserted that in the wake of the Holocaust, God (or the idea of God) was dead. His book, as you might surmise, is an effort to respond to such thinkers and to demonstrate how one might maintain faith in a world in which the unthinkable has happened. Berkovits mounts a vigorous attack on this view that “the universe is indifferent toward human destiny.” He cites the work of existentialists such as Albert Camus, who wrote, in his postwar Letters to a German Friend, “I know that heaven, which was indifferent to your horrible victories, will be equally indifferent to your just defeat. Even now I expect nothing from heaven.” Berkovits comments: “This, we take it, is what is meant by the absurdity of existence. Life is absurd, it is without meaning. The only meanings, the only values, are those created by man. There is nothing beyond this existence, beyond this ethical indifference of the cosmos. There is no possibility for any reference to the transcendental for values and standards. Life is altogether man’s responsibility, his choice and his decision; it is his fight against a meaningless fate. The meaning that man alone can create is the only justification for a meaningless universe” [p.71]. But, as Berkovits points out, such a worldview provides no basis for any objective criticism of evil. Without an absolute standard of value, on what basis are we to say that the concentration camps were wrong? If, as the existentialists say, there is no value or meaning to life other than what we attribute to it, then all opinions about morality are equally valid. Such a position, Berkovits says, “if carried to its logical conclusion…leads to a justification of Nazism itself. If there is no possibility for a transcendental value reference, if existence…is fundamentally meaningless and man alone is the creator of values, who is to determine what the values are going to be or what the man-made meaning is to be? Man, of course. But which man? ….There is no Man [in the abstract]; there are only men! There are only people; and they are of all kinds, with different temperaments, varied desires, and manifold self-created goals which set them at cross-purposes with each other.” What is most moving, for me, in Berkovits’s work is that he does not attempt to defend God or explain the “reason” for the Holocaust – indeed, he says that all such reasoning is morally repugnant. Here stands opposed to others in the Orthodox world such as the Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, himself a concentration camp inmate, who taught that six million Jews were killed as punishment for Zionism and assimilation. Berkovits takes a very different path. He reminds us that questions about God’s apparent silence in times of suffering are not a new phenomenon; indeed, our Jewish sacred writings are full of them. In addition to the book of Job, which centers on this question, he cites anguished cries from the psalms and prophets. From psalm 44: “Awake, why sleepest Thou, O Lord? Arouse Thyself, cast not off forever. Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly cleaveth to the earth.” Those who came before us were not strangers to anguish, and they contemplated a world that seemed, all too often, barren of God’s love and care. They did not deceive themselves, says Berkovits. They did not close their eyes or take refuge in comforting fairy tales. Nor did they give up their faith. How was this possible? The Bible, he says, speaks of “Hester Panim, the Hiding of the Face, God’s hiding of his countenance from the sufferer.” Sometimes this refers to an act of punishment, writes Berkovits, but the Hebrew Bible also uses this phrase to describe an essential element of the nature of God. The prophet Isaiah says of God: “Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior” [45:15]. For Isaiah, and for Berkovits, the very nature of God is to be hidden. “Such is God. He is a God, who hides himself. Man may seek him and he will not be found; man may call to him and he may not answer. God’s hiding his face in this case is not a response to man, but a quality of being assumed by God on his own initiative. But neither is it due to divine indifference toward the destiny of man” [p.101]. Why is God in hiding? God grants freedom to human beings, says Berkovits, and must therefore withdraw his presence to allow us to exercise our freedom. A necessary consequence of freedom is that the innocent will suffer. “God cannot as a rule intervene whenever man’s use of freedom displeases him” [p.105]. And God is patient and “long-suffering” with the wicked as well as with the righteous, meaning that those who do evil are not struck down on the spot by a God forever hovering and interfering in our lives. “While God waits for the sinner to turn to him,” writes Berkovits, “there is oppression and persecution and violence among men” [p.106]. The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash were poignantly aware of this reality; Berkovits cites the famous text in which they re-define God’s “might” to mean God’s powerful ability to restrain himself in the face of human freedom and to tolerate the existence of evil. Freedom and responsibility are of the very nature of man; without them, human beings are impossible. And so Berkovits writes: “The question therefore is not: Why is there undeserved suffering? But, why is there man? He who asks the question about injustice in history really asks: Why a world? Why creation?” [p.105]. We are left, Berkovits says, with the potent image, bequeathed by Jewish tradition, of Hester Panim, the God whose nature it is to conceal His presence from humankind. But a hiding God is not the same as a God who is not there. Hiding is an ambiguous notion, implying both God’s reality and God’s inaccessibility, both the desolation experienced during the Shoah and our ultimate confidence that evil will not win out. The God of history, Berkovits writes, “is present without being manifest; he is absent without being hopelessly inaccessible. Thus, many find him even in his ‘absence’; many miss him even in his presence. Because of the necessity of his absence, there is the ‘Hiding of the Face’ and suffering of the innocent; because of the necessity of his presence, evil will not ultimately triumph; because of it, there is hope for man” [p.107]. For Berkovits and for those who share his faith,
Berkovits confesses himself awed and humbled by the many who clung to faith even as they suffered in the ghettoes and camps; he recounts with reverence the many instances of kind and generous behavior that occurred in the darkest times. The mystery of goodness, he says, is no less astounding than the mystery of evil. So also is the extraordinary mystery of the people
For Berkovits the words of Job remain a powerful affirmation in our own post-Holocaust world: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in God” [1:4-5]. They suggest a defiant clinging to faith, an insistence on meaning, a refusal to abandon the deepest truths we know. Job asserts God’s reality even as he raises his voice to question and challenge and sometimes to defy. In this spirit Berkovits writes: “No matter how silent God may every so often be, we have heard his voice and because of that we know his word; no matter how empty of God vast tracts of the waste lands of history may appear to be, we know of his presence as we stand astounded contemplating our own existence. True, these are contradictory experiences, which present the mind with a serious dilemma. But no matter how serious the dilemma, it cannot erase the fact of the continuing reality of
“Even if no answers could be found, we would still be left with the only alternative with which Job too was left, i.e., of contending with God while trusting in him, of questioning while believing, inquiring with our minds yet knowing in our hearts! And even as we search for the answer, praising Him as the rabbis of old did: who is like you our God, mighty in silence!” [p.113] There is something heroic in such faith, at least for me: something heroic in the stubborn stance of the Jewish people before our God. I like to think of us as the loyal opposition, holding fast to our integrity, but holding on to God as well, and doing God’s work until the end of days. That is what matters, of course. As Martin Buber says, in my favorite words about God: “God does not wish to be believed in, discussed or defended by us, but simply to be realized by us.” And there, I hope, is the ground on which all of us can meet – those who have fought their way to faith, and those who can’t believe, and everyone else in between. We stand together on the field of action, bound by shared commitment to the work, and by the shared conviction or hope that our efforts are not in vain. I think of those desperate moments near the end of Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague,” when the city is overrun by disease and death, and two men – Dr. Rieux, the nonbeliever, and Dr. Paneloux, the devout priest, work side by side to save whatever lives they can. That is what life is about, in the end: not our beliefs or intentions, but the courage to take a stand and to do what needs to be done. As one character in the novel says, “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences” [p.229]. I end with a story that comforts me whenever I wrestle with God:
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